At Issue - Is Canada ready for another Trump presidency?

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

At Issue this week: Donald Trump is heading back to the White House, but is the Liberal government ready for the unpredictability? The political lessons from Kamala Harris’s defeat. Plus, Canada shuts down TikTok’s offices over security concerns. Rosemary Barton hosts Chantal Hébert, Andrew Coyne and Althia Raj.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Rosemary Barton. This week on At Issue, the podcast edition for Thursday, November 7th. Election fallout. Donald Trump is returning to the White House in a historic comeback and Ottawa is preparing to respond to the unpredictability

of his administration. The Liberals say they're ready. On our side, we've been preparing for this. We're looking forward to doing this work. We're looking forward to continuing to work together for the prosperity and the security of people on both sides of our shared border. So obviously this week we're asking what is at stake for Canada with Trump back in the office? How will the Team Canada approach respond to threats of tariffs and other issues? Chantelle Hebert, Andrew Coyne and Althea Raj join me to talk about that. Plus, are there some lessons to be learned here from Kamala Harris' defeat and Donald Trump's win? Andrew, I'm going to start with you. The government says that they have planned for this.

They're in some ways prepared for it. I'm not sure they were prepared for the scale of the victory. But what do you make of how this might unfold for Canada and what we should be watching for? Well, there are some things that are predictable and some things that are unpredictable. It's the old line about known unknowns, etc. Obviously, one of the issues will be trade and tariffs

and trying to remake the NAFTA if he wants to do that again. A second issue would be NATO and defense spending and the pressure that will come under, but we're under that pressure already. A third item that may be more positive, at least from my perspective, is we may be able to claw back some of those electric vehicle battery subsidies that we were shelling out to match the ones that Joe Biden put in. If Trump cans those, then maybe some of the pressure will be off on that. But the thing that I think we all have to take into account is things could get really crazy down there in a hurry.

It's one thing Mr. Trump is one thing, but the people around him, some of them, are fanatics. And they believe they have a mandate to remake American society from the ground up. And some of them talk in ways that, and some of the policies they propose, are bound to produce a ferocious backlash in the United States, particularly the plan to deport 12 million undocumented immigrants. The capacity for that to trigger reactions

and counter-reactions and counter-counter-reactions and for things to get really unstable there, I think should not be discounted and would, at the very least, have the capacity to send a lot of people flooding north trying to escape the internment camps that the Trump people have planned for them. But more broadly, if you get real unrest and instability in the United States, that's bound to have repercussions in ways that you can plan for, you can project, but you really can't predict in any kind of certain way. And Althea, that is sort of the challenge for the government right now, is that trade and tariffs and stuff that, I mean,

may be unpredictable, but the kinds of things Andrew's talking about, who knows? I think it's all going to be unpredictable. I mean, I was struck by the language, we're looking forward to this work. No, I don't think anybody is looking forward to this work. It's like you. It's worse than a root canal. It is so unpredictable that it's really hard to plan for, actually. So, Andrea, is that a really good case about what immigration repercussions and the asylum claims possibly arriving at the border? I'm not sure it's going to be as bad as perhaps that we fear.

And I'm somewhat heartened to see that the government has actually thought about this because it didn't seem like it thought that much about how to deal with Roxham Road until it was too big a crisis to ignore. On the, you know, like what's at stake, he has said very clearly that he wants to renegotiate KUSMA, the USMCA, the NAFTA 2.0 agreement. That is a huge deal for Canada. It has serious repercussions for the dairy industry.

It has serious repercussions for the auto industry. 80% of the cars that we make here, we export to the United States. That's millions of jobs. So I think we're going to see probably more of a rapprochement with the United States, more of a continental approach. You heard Doug Ford talk about this earlier in the week when he talked about, you know, we shouldn't be talking about Team Canada. We need to be talking about Team North America. And that's going to be a challenge for the government. You know, at the same time that in order to kind of take the bullseye away from Canada, we need to harmonize our policies and be more integrated and kind of make that case. You have somebody that a lot of Canadians, most Canadians, the vast majority of

Canadians do not want to align themselves with at all. So it's going to be a very interesting tightrope exercise for the government. Yeah, I thought it was interesting that in the call that Trudeau and Trump had yesterday, Trump was very interested in the tariffs we had already put on China, because, of course, that's right in his laneway. And so no daylight between the two parties. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was pretty interesting. Chantal, your thoughts? Yes. And on the campaign trail, Donald Trump also talked about cuts to immigration coming from Canada to kind of validate this approach. But seriously, you can't plan for unpredictability, especially when the U.S. administration is in play.

The notion that because you've seen it before, you're okay to do it again, it doesn't hold in this case. Why? Because most of the adults that acted as guardrails the first time around have just spent three months telling Americans not to vote for Donald Trump. So they must have seen something that has spooked them. But it also means they're all out of the loop. I think two things. One, the American system's benefit to Canada

is that Donald Trump will not be in the White House until January 20th. And I believe the real planning has to happen between now and then, because you're going to get a much better take of where this is going between now and then. And in the case of the new NAFTA, yes, there is a deadline,

but it's 2026. And that basically means that there is time to see what is happening where. But that being said, what this election result basically means is that whoever runs Canada

after the next federal election, and that election will come sooner than 2026, will see most of his agenda eaten up with the management of the Canada-US and the global relationships. We should mention one other thing, which is we may be in for quite a challenge on the tax cut front. Mr. Trump has talked about replacing the income tax with tariffs.

I doubt that that's going to happen. But you could be sure that he's going to bring in further corporate tax cuts, and this will certainly make for a competitive challenge that can't be ignored. And at a time when we're wrestling with deficits and more spending on defense, for example, that's going to be hard to finance and hard to match. But we can't just ignore it. Althea? I'm not sure that there's no benefit to part of the approach the first time. Relationships don't just vanish overnight. And so if Lighthizer is

still around, that's a relationship that this prime minister's office has invested a lot. Even the relationship between the prime minister and the president-elect, foreign president, while not always warm, at least not publicly, at least seems cordial. I was struck that Viktor Orban is apparently more important than Canada on the list of world leaders to call back. But I think that there is still value in having some relationships built. The bigger challenge, frankly, is the kind of like everyday official to official relationships. Mr. Trump wants to put basically partisans in the first top three levels of the bureaucracy. That means all those relationships that we depend on for like the boring stuff, like the water in the big lakes and the great lakes, you know, like things

like the stuff that we don't cover in the news, but actually needs to get done. That's the stuff that you're going to have to, those relationships will be gone. And those people that you're going to be dealing with will be perhaps radically different in terms of their ideology. That's going to be a real challenge for the bureaucracy as well as the politicians. Last 30 seconds to Chantal. If only those were the real challenges. I find it a bit of a thing that people make themselves believe that dealing with Donald Trump after having watched this campaign is going to be anything resembling what happened the first time around in any way, shape or form. And I believe that most Canadians who follow the campaign, whether they are happy or not with the results, and in the next block, we will talk about that, totally understand that the message of the government,

stay cool, it's almost business as usual, is, excuse my language, BS. At issue, the Democrats lose big while Kamala Harris and her campaign are still reviewing their defeat. Her message to supporters, stay strong and keep fighting. On the campaign, I would often say, when we fight, we win. But here's the thing, here's the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn't mean we won't win. So can liberals in this country learn from the Democrats' loss? Should conservatives take heart in a Trump victory? What can all of this tell us about what might happen here and what political parties might learn from that? Chantal, Andrew,

and Althea are back. Chantal, what do you think are the biggest takeaways politically for our politicians in terms of what unfolded down there? Because this is a year of a lot of elections and a lot of incumbents losing. It's going to take a while for that to settle. But seriously, if I were the conservatives and the other parties, I would notice that inflation and cost of living issues, Trump, all including some fairly offensive language on the campaign trail, which will not be matched to that level in this country in the next campaign but basically a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump by the looks of it were driven by the cost of living issue not by his language not by because race immigration you're going to deport people that's one for liberals who are thinking about changing leaders as if it's a magic formula changing leaders as if it's a magic formula, changing leaders late in the game, no magic formula. Even when the leader campaigns, the new leader campaigns rather well at the end of the day after that initial bump.

And we have seen that in this country with John Turner, with Kim Campbell. It does vanish and you return to fundamentals. And I think those two main lessons will probably stick. And also the fact that what were the numbers in 2024? There have been 10 elections in major countries. And in every single one of them, the incumbent got sent home. Not from the right or the left. That wasn't the point. If you were the incumbent this year, you've just drawn the wrong ticket at that lottery.

I mean, this year, maybe the Liberals, that's why they want to wait till next year. Maybe things will improve. Oh, yeah, it's going to get a lot better in six months. But there is a lesson there for them, Andrew, that they seem to be aware of, but have not corrected. And that is talking about the economy and just hammering at home the kinds of things that you can do for Canadians. They will tell you they're aware of it, but I don't see signs that there's any actual fix being done, really. Yeah. I mean, the good news for the Liberals, if I can put it this way, is the voter groups that they would be in danger of losing, that you could read into this result,

you know, disaffected rural voters, disaffected young men, people who are upset about the economy, they've already lost them. I mean, they're at 22% in the polls. There's not a lot further they can fall. So those lessons, if they've been learned, or if they were going to be learned, would have been learned already. And we'll see whether they've learned them or whether there's not a lot further they can fall. So those lessons, if they've been learned, or if they were going to be learned, would have been learned already, and we'll see whether they've learned them or whether there's anything they can do about it. I'd be careful, that being said, of not over-reading what went on down there. I want to reinforce Chantal's point that the dust is all still settling. People tend to rush into print after American elections

with all kinds of sweeping statements of what went on before the votes have been counted. There's still, by my calculation, 12 million votes to be counted, most of them in California. By the end of this, you're going to find that the sweeping mandate is about two percentage points of margin of victory over Harris, so 50 to 48. That's not a particularly sweeping mandate. And again, people will read into that and say, well, the reason the Democrats lost,

the reason Republicans win is because the voters were either for or against the things that I'm for or against. People tend to invest meaning in these things that conforms with their prior convictions. So just be careful of any of the, including mine, of any readings into this, because they will tend to conform with what people would like parties to be saying and doing anyway. So Althea, tell me what you think this tells us about what political parties might do here differently or can learn from what happened. Well, just to go back to Andrew's point, I mean, the liberals have not just lost men and rural voters. They've also lost women and college. They've lost everybody.

So I think there are lessons for the incumbent government. I'm just not really sure what they can do in that short period of time. I think that the major lessons are really medium and message. I think that the center-right wing of the political spectrum has really created their own ecosystem through social media, through the internet and online publications in a way that the left has not done and not invested that time. And they're reaching tens of millions of people incredibly easily. And centrist center left parties are still using traditional sources of news who have seen their readership and listenership and viewership decline rapidly. And so the message isn't getting there. The other problem, frankly, is that

it may not just be that they don't know how to communicate, is that they're not sure what they're communicating about. Mr. Poitier has been really good, in the same way that Mr. Trump has been really good, about pinning the blame for the economic situation that people feel on the incumbent government. You know, whether it's the carbon price or the gasoline price or inflation, Mr. Poitier has really successfully prosecuted the case that it is the government's fault. Justin Trudeau's fault, personally, that the costs have gone up. And it makes it seem like Justin Trudeau can absolutely do something about it, and he's fault, Justin Trudeau's fault personally, that the costs have gone up. And it makes it seem like Justin Trudeau can absolutely do something about it. And he's choosing not to.

So like one person's on your side and the other person is not just not on your side, but is actively working against you. That is a really powerful message. And the liberals are still in that preachy tone, attacking tone, dismissive tone. How do you reach new groups of voters with a message like that? I think there's so many lessons to look inwardly, but it's also about, I think, them struggling with how do they counter that message? Because they're not really sure ideologically what they are offering. In the same way that clip you just aired of Kamala Harris,

what is the fight that she's talking about? I'm not sure, and I've been watching the US news almost non-stop for the past eight months. Okay, Chantal. And there's one thing I've noticed since Tuesday.

It's totally anecdotal, but I've run across people, and I've been traveling from Ontario to Quebec and back all week. More people than last week are telling me that they are not disappointed with the Trump result,

which I read as that there are many people who are telling pollster they want to vote conservative, and now they feel that they've been given permission why because they know that cap well you have is not like Donald Trump but if the Americans can go there to get rid of an incumbent it's a lot easier for them to go to Pia Polly of and I I think the

Liberals who are sitting around saying this is great because Canadians are gonna to be spooked by this and they're going to run to us. Some may, but I'm not convinced that that's a really valid strategy. Fifteen seconds or so, Andrew. It's not certain that there's a potential upside for the liberals. If Trump starts really getting a stripper and beating up on the country and if the government can be seen to be the ones that says, look, we've got the experience and the willpower to actually stand up to this guy, and Poiavra won't because he's too beholden to his base or because he's too inexperienced, it could cut both ways, but potentially it could be to the Liberals' advantage. At issue, TikTok. The federal government is banning TikTok Canada from operating in this country,

forcing the company to shut down offices, but still allowing users to access the app. Ottawa says the measure is to protect national security. The decision we took was to protect the national security of Canada on the basis of the analysis that we conducted with our security services. So what's remained of this move against TikTok Canada? Why are Canadians still allowed on the app despite these concerns? Let's break all that down. Chantal, Andrew and Althea, I am not on TikTok. I don't know if any of you are. I am not. And we're not going to talk about TikTok. But I do find the decision sort of confusing because you're saying you can't have

these offices open in Canada for national security reasons, but it's totally safe and fine for Canadians to be using TikTok. And I'm not sure what to make of that discrepancy. Let's call it that for now, Althea. Well, actually, they're not saying that, Rosemary. Okay. CSIS is clearly telling us, yes, we think the Chinese can access your data. You should be really worried about your children having their data by a foreign government. And when they're 20 and they're traveling around the world, maybe this will be a safety issue. And we highly recommend that you do not use TikTok. But the government is not preventing people from using it, is my point.

No, although I do wonder what happens with the case in the United States if that goes forward, if Canada will follow suit so I think that they're they've kind of opened the possibility that that happening I think the reason and this is just I'll see it hypothesizing yes um is because um because I don't know this uh there are so many Canadians on TikTok and they do not want to annoy that potential voter base um so they have left it. But it does not make a lot of sense. And again, this is like an issue with national security and trust and institution when an institution tells you this is not safe, but we can't tell you why and carry on as usual, or at least they seem to give that message. So it is confusing. And it leads again to further trust in our institutions.

That is what our very smart and younger producer, Dhruv, said, that this is probably not about you. You don't want to ban TikTok when you're trying to get young people to vote for you. Like there's a problem there. Chantal. Okay, so you would want to shut down the people that you could haul in to say, wait a minute, you're not doing this properly. And so you can answer it. TikTok is bad. It's dangerous.

National security. But we can't call in anyone to say, if you don't stop this, we're going to do something about it because you're shutting them down. I see what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of weird. But I'm not an expert. I have to say I can't figure it out.

That's okay. I'm not on it either. The attitude panel basselled. Maybe they'll put this segment on CBC's TikTok and then it'll be fine. Andrew. Well, there's the internal inconsistency of it's so dangerous that you can't let them have their corporate offices here, but it's not so dangerous that we're not going to prevent vulnerable and impressionable kids from accessing it.

That's inconsistent. But it's also inconsistent with the whole approach to the Internet that this government has taken. I mean, the horse left the barn some time ago about is the government going to regulate the Internet? These are people proposing, you know proposing life sentences for hate speech online. They're proposing to regulate people's use of YouTube clips if they're not Canadian enough. But suddenly we can't regulate TikTok that might be used by the Chinese government to blackmail people and intrude upon their privacy. I don't see how that makes any kind of sense, whatever. Well, and I also don't understand, I guess that's what this segment is. I also don't

understand why they didn't say more about the threat to national security. Is it because they believe China is spying on people? Is it because they're interfering? Like, what is the specific threat that they are talking about? That's the other part I don't. But if those threats are real, then closing down the Canadian operations but telling people you can still use it makes no sense. I mean, we don't live in a world where closing down an office in Canada resolves an issue that happens in that world.

The point is that ByteDance, the company that owns it, is obliged by Chinese law to make its information available to the Chinese authorities, whatever that information may be. So it could be blackmail issues, it could be privacy issues, it could be spying in the case of the government, although the government some time ago blocked that out. But it's pretty open-ended. If it's not platform-specific, then they should have said so.

Yeah. Because instead they've just left a whole bunch of unanswered questions. Okay. I feel reassured that my confusion is warranted. So glad we got that sorted. Thank you all very much for that. I appreciate it. That's at issue for this very busy week. How are you feeling about the results of the U.S. election? Why don't you let us know? We're also preparing for our annual year-end political discussion, where you finally get to decide what's at issue. You can send your political questions to thenational at cbc.ca and hopefully you'll get to ask them. I'm Rosemary Barton. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.